Trial By Fire
Teams spend months hiring a strong candidate. Sourcing, interviews, debriefs, approvals, compensation, notice period. Everyone treats the hire like a serious investment. Then th...
#Accountability
Writing on ownership, follow-through, and making responsibilities explicit.
The Roadmap Is Not the System
A few years ago, my father decided to build a house in the . On the surface, it was easy to like the idea. A quiet place. A porch. A garden. Somewhere to disappear for a while....
Escaping Status Theater
I still think about one migration project where everything was green until the final month. We did not have the luxury of extending the deadline. This was tied to external regul...
Scaling Culture Without Dilution
As organizations grow across geographies, one thing becomes disproportionately important. Culture. We, engineers, often dismiss culture as soft and cushy. This is until you see...
Why Politics Appear
Ancient Athens did not solve uncertainty with better communication. They solved it by removing people. Once a year, citizens gathered to vote on exile. Not for crimes. Not for f...
How to Work with Me
In 1935, Boeing had a new bomber prototype, the Model 299, which later became the B17. It was impressive, and it was also easy to mess up because it had more switches and steps...
What Good Execution Looks Like
The other day I was talking with one of my directs. We ended up discussing something we’ve both learned over the years. When execution works, the environment is quiet. Not slow....
Managing Your Manager
Managers change more often than you realize, especially when a company is growing or downsizing. New roles, new org charts, new reporting lines. Other times, you’re shopping aro...
The Weekly Win
If you happen to work for a large organization, you’ve probably heard of quarterly checkins or some similar corporate buzzword to describe what you’ve done and what you could ha...
Onboarding Your Engineering Manager
Bringing on a new leader to your organization is always tricky. It starts with . Then comes the real part. Onboarding! I always think bringing in a new leader without context is...
Building Remote Teams
You've probably heard stories of big tech companies in US and hiring double that number in India, blaming AI for the shift. Everyone's first thought is likely cheap labor. While...
Representing the Business
The other day, someone asked me why we even need managers. What do they actually do? I think it’s a fair question, and honestly, people get it wrong a lot. You can throw usual f...
Take Self Reviews Seriously
This isn’t the first and definitely won’t be the last time I find myself in a conversation about the importance of self checkins, performance reviews, and all that socalled “ref...
Chasing Real Respect
You can fake a lot of things in business. Authority. Expertise. Competence. But you can’t fake certain , like respect. Think about the managers you’ve had in the past. The good...
The Invisible Difference
There are plenty of skills you can pick up along the way. Some come from , some through experience. A lot of it is just trial and error. And some from . You figure things out su...
PIP Manager Insights
I remember one of my directs stepping into a new manager role, only to inherit a team with one or two employees who just weren’t cutting it. From day one, it was a challenge. He...
Work-Life Balance as a Manager
As an IC, you close your laptop at 6 PM, log off, and forget about the work unless you are oncall. As a manager, you check Slack at 10 PM because someone might need you. Your ca...
Hiring Red Flags
Hiring is tough. It's one of the most important tasks a manager faces while growing their team. The problem with hiring is that a bad hire can significantly impact you financial...
Subteam Tenets
Over the years, working across multiple organizations, I developed the concept of subteam tenets. I’ve tweaked it along the way to fit each company's unique quirks, but I still...
Overriding a People Leader’s Decision
When managing managers or leaders, there will be times when you feel that the right course of action differs from their opinion. It could be related to rating an employee, decid...
From Misperception to Promotion
If you are in the realm of management, sooner or later, you will encounter someone who wants a promotion but isn’t quite ready for it. In fact, I have seen many cases where the...
Getting Delegation Right
In software business, leaders often need to delegate the work. Yet, I have seen leaders struggle with it, often saying, “I try to delegate, but it never quite works.” The truth...
Interviewing Your Future Boss
I’m sure you have been asked if you have any questions during interviews. A few things come to mind. Often, we think we need to impress the other party. Nevertheless, tough ques...
Leading from Where You Are
When we were building Areca, a realtime billing engine for Turk Telekom, we were a small team competing against giants like Amdocs. They had the brand recognition, the scale, an...
The Power of Consistency
One of my friends from primary school didn’t go to high school. At first, it was a bit surprising, but his family was making kebap, and he wanted to run the family business. Bec...
The Making of a Leader
Leadership, in my eyes, has always been a blend of natural inclination and learned skills. Reflecting on my own path to becoming a leader, I've realized it's not just about inna...
Leading Self Managing Teams
When I first started leading teams, I thought being a good manager meant being everywhere. I felt like checking every ticket, joining every status update and so on. I got exhaus...
Engineering Strategy and Planning
Strategy is a word that's often used but rarely understood. Ask ten people what it means, and you'll get ten different answers. I often see people confuse it with , a quarterly...
Data as a Product is a Promise
Domaindriven design (DDD) has been around for quite a long time. In short, DDD focuses on domain to match domain requirements. One of the pillars of DDD is bounded context. A bo...
Engineering Roles and Responsibilities
Engineering organizations have roles and responsibilities either explicitly or implicitly. When it’s explicit, one or more people exercise the engineering role, and the responsi...
Essential Engineering Principles
Engineering principles give teams a practical foundation for how to build and operate software. They guide decisions, shape behaviours, and help groups stay aligned even as syst...
Manager as a Service
What would a manager as a service look like? What kind of systems would a manager resemble? How can you describe a manager’s responsibility through various systems? Here’s my ta...
Code Author
Throughout the years I have worked on many software projects. In most of them, the code header included the authorʼs name. At first, it seemed natural to have the authorʼs name....
Risk Comes First
You probably saw many cliché stuff about risking everything. Not risking is the biggest risk and all. While there is a truth to that, risk needs to be an appetite. Remember what...
I'm no longer a Scrum Master
Recently, I received an email from Scrum Alliance. My Scrum Master Certificate has expired. As expected, the email was suggesting to get certified again, a friendly nudge to sta...